Belief System.

It was 87 on the front porch today. In the shade. It's August. It's late August, yes, but it's August. And what I still cannot believe—though I spent much of yesterday wearing long sleeves just to see if I could hope us into it—is that once it dips below 70 degrees sometime in the wee hours tonight, certain of the fancies don't want us to see seventy again until Wednesday. It seems impossible. It seems desperately unlikely. It seems so glorious a proposition that I am afeared of jinxing it, afeared of saying much other than that I've already bought lunch for tomorrow in the brilliant, rainy hope that I won't have to leave the house, that the most I'll need to do all day is move from porch to porch, dig out the tea, think about how the only way I would leave the house is to head a couple hours north, up towards Mt. Rogers, where it may not break sixty in the ensuing fifty hours or so.

I mean, even if it does happen, it only means that when it's ninety in October it'll just break all our hearts that much more—but this is like hoping for a snow day even though you know it means they'll send you to school on a Saturday later on. This is the mathematics of childhood, and, for that matter, of every other -hood: I will take it now even if it will do me some small damage later on. This is what we have to learn, and learn again: to take what is offered, to know what to do with it, to hope for what clearly is not possible, and then to act like we're not surprised when it does finally, shockingly, unseasonably arrive.

And I still can't quite believe it'll happen.